Florida tried to cut back essential citrus statistics program for the industry

The state and federal agriculture departments need to trim $300,000 to $400,000 off the cost of counting the Florida citrus crop and other important statistics the state’s citrus industry has relied upon for decades.

The state and federal agriculture departments need to trim $300,000 to $400,000 off the cost of counting the Florida citrus crop and other important statistics the state’s citrus industry has relied upon for decades.
On Friday, an advisory panel of Florida citrus leaders couldn’t agree on cutting $30,637 from those costs.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture plays the lead role in collecting Florida citrus statistics in partnership with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. They run the statistical collection program out of the Florida Field Office in Maitland.Citrus industry officials rely on those statistics to do business, such as setting farm prices for each season’s crop of oranges, grapefruit and tangerines between the grower/sellers and the buyers, mostly juice processing companies and fresh fruit packinghouses.

The USDA issues monthly reports from October to July on the status of that season’s crop, primarily the number of boxes projected to be harvested.The program is financed by a tax on each commercial box of citrus harvested, currently 1.67 cents per box in the 2016-17 season. That has generated nearly $1.2 million this season.

But the program projects to run a $433,930 deficit in the current season, according to a budget summary presented to the Citrus Crop Estimates Advisory Committee meeting at the Grove House in Lake Wales. Over the past three seasons, the operating deficit has run between $262,201 in 2013-14 to as much as $477,970 the following season. At issue Friday was whether the program should continue to collect statistics on fruit maturity, including sugar and acid content in the juice, and juice yields from each box of citrus. The numbers play a role in the purchasing contracts between growers and processors.

Committee members representing processors with some support from grower members argued for retaining that part of the collection program.

“This is an important piece of information,” said Dave Crumbly, vice president of agricultural services at Florida’s Natural Growers in Lake Wales, the nation’s third largest orange juice retailer. “All the plants would operate differently without it.”

Although processors collect the same data for the fruit they buy, the figures are not publicly available, as the USDA data is.Several members argued the budget savings, representing equipment rentals, is insignificant. But adding staff time and other associated costs, the savings would exceed $100,000, said Candi Erick, a state Agriculture Department administrator with the program. If Florida citrus officials are unwilling to make this cut, “the reality is we’ll be back at this table looking at other things to cut,” said committee chairman Mark Wheeler, a Lake Placid-based grower.

Mark Hudson, a USDA’s chief Florida administrator, advised the committee it would be difficult to bring the program back once it was eliminated.

“These programs are like a hair line — when it’s gone, it’s gone,” said Hudson, who is bald.

The committee voted unanimously to continue collecting the statistics on maturity and juice yield but explore ways of working with processors to share information. In a slightly less contentious debate, the committee agreed to recommend a change in the way the USDA reports the size of Florida’s specialty citrus crop, which includes tangerines and tangelos.

The USDA projects the 2016-17 specialty crop at 1.52 million boxes, but it breaks that total down according to four different varieties, all below 1 million boxes currently. The problem is less a budget issue but one of accuracy, said Hudson, who argued for reducing the report to a single number. “Historically when any crop gets below a million boxes, it’s very difficult for our forecast,” he said. “It’s getting hard to put out a number that is reliable when the target is that low.”

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